Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development by Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

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Perspectivas antropológicas sobre la Amazonia contemporánea

MARGARITA CHAVES Y CARLOS DEL CAIRO,

COMPILADORES

INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

OTHER TITLES

This work is based on research and advocacy with the people of two multiethnic indigenous resguardos located at the outskirts of the Colombian towns of Leticia and Puerto Nariño. Through an analysis of the relationship between development institutions and indigenous people, the book examines the dynamics of social praxis in contexts where development is debated, enforced, and subverted, and it does so in a dialogue with the critical perspective of post-development, and the critiques woven by indigenous people on the basis of their experiences, world-views, and embodied perceptions of well-being. In spite of being the postulate of development “the improvement of the people’s quality of life,” indigenous people express the feeling that their life quality has become worse as development projects proceed, and they see themselves as both physically and spiritually ill. While they become increasingly involved in the development apparatus, they strive to resist the implicit beliefs of development as well as its practical workings. In a situation of crisis, which pervades, as a virus, the human, social, and cosmic bodies, indigenous people endeavor to cure the pathogenic energy of development through the strengthening of cultural meanings and the weaving of intercultural alliances. For the supra-ethnic ensemble known as People of the Center, this twofold process is articulated through the ritual consumption of coca and tobacco. This work asks why this philosophical and ritual system is able to resonate in an indigenous multicultural context, and how it generates schemas for political agency that intertwine in a powerful way healing, dissent, and the consolidation of intercultural networks.

Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development GIOVANNA MICARELLI

GIOVANNA MICARELLI Associate professor of anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, and researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, directed by Prof. Boaventura de Sousa Santos. She has worked in the Amazon since 1995, with the Conibo Shipibo of the Ucayali region in Perú, the Tikuna of the Amacayacu river, and the indigenous peoples belonging to the supra-ethnic ensemble People of the Center at the periphery of the Colombian town of Leticia. Beside her research on indigenous critical engagements with development and modernity, she has worked on social-environmental understandings in the construction and defense of the territory, and on native modes of knowing – indigenous epistemologies - particularly embodied knowledge. Envisioning ethnographic methods as a horizontal exchange with indigenous intellectuals and communities, she has been engaged in different indigenous processes of cultural reaffirmation and self-determination.

INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

GIOVANNA MICARELLI

Facultad de Ciencias Sociales

Reservados todos los derechos © Pontificia Universidad Javeriana © Giovanna Micarelli Primera edición: noviembre 2014 Bogotá, D.C. isbn: 978-958-716-819-8 Número de ejemplares: 200 Impreso y hecho en Colombia Printed and made in Colombia Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Carrera 7, N.º 37-25, oficina 1301 Edificio Lutaima Teléfono: 320 8320 ext. 4752 www.javeriana.edu.co/editorial Bogotá, D. C.

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Micarelli, Giovanna Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development / Giovanna Micarelli. -- 1a ed. -- Bogotá : Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2014. -- (Colección diario de campo) 236 p. : ilustraciones, fotos, mapas y tablas ; 24 cm. Incluye referencias bibliográficas. ISBN : 978-958-716-819-8 1. ANTROPOLOGÍA CULTURAL - COLOMBIA. 2. INDÍGENAS DE COLOMBIA. 3. RELACIONES SOCIALES - COLOMBIA. 5. GEOGRAFÍA HUMANA - COLOMBIA. I. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. CDD 306 ed. 21 Catalogación en la publicación - Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Biblioteca Alfonso Borrero Cabal, S.J. opg.

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Contenido

List of Illustrations

Notes on Transcription

Acknowledgements

Introduction

L iving in the K ilómetros : C onceiving T heory as P raxis O ut of the H ouse : A nthropological K nowledge and the E thics of F ieldwork W eaving a T ext Entwined Landscapes: Sensory Itineraries and the Topography of Power

R outes , M aps , T erritories “C arretera A rriba …C arretera A bajo :” C omunidades and M alocas Situating Development

C oca and T obacco : “O ur P rinciple of O rganization ” D evelopment as I llness , I ndigenous A ntibodies T he P ractice of C ulture C onclusions

15 16 23 27

35 38 50 65 71 78 82 94

Comparative Interstice: On the Verge of Development

Policies, Politics, and Orders of Worth

103

R acionales and N aturalitos : T he C onstruction a L esser S ubject “ ¿A dónde está la plata ?”: M oney and the V alue of S ocial R elations T he C risis

105 123 131

Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances

A M uinane W ay to C onduct a P roject N ative C lassifications S ide P aths : L earning H ow to L earn H ow D oes the S peech C ure ? P oetic P erformances P erformances for S urvival : C uring the B ody , and the W orld

139 140 144 150 155 162 the

S ociety ,

Organization: Histories and Territories

A P lace to S it R outes and R oots : T he P erformance of I dentity O Abïmo Erokaï, ‘Look at Your Body’: An Indigenous Project T erritories : T he A ncestral F ootprints C onclusions Four Pillars and a Dance Floor

S ituating D evelopment T he P oetics of D issent R itual and P olitics I nterethnic N etworks and P lace -M aking A D ance F loor References

169 173 173 178 184 192 207 209 210 211 212 214 216 219

List of Illustrations

Maps Map 1: The Peruvian-Colombian-Brazilian border with main locations

where research was conducted.

Map 2: Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km 6-11

Map 3: Routes between the Putumayo and the Amazon Basin

Photographs Photo 1: A contemporary maloca

Photo 2: Indigenous community “Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Murui,” also known as Kilómetro 11

Photo 3: Introduced housing in the indigenous community

“Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Murui”, Kilómetro 11.

Photo 4: Carefully collecting coca leaves: “each leaf is a word”.

Photo 5: An example of indigenous connections. A bowl full of mambe

sits on a Yap “stone money” donated by a Micronesian indigenous delegation during a visit in the year 2000. Kilómetro 11 community

Photo 6: Extracting the poison of bitter manioc. Kilómetro 11 community 137

Photo 7: They showed her a huge chagra (swidden plot) with plenty of manioc, plantain, coca, peanut plants. “Había de todo,” “it was plenty of everything.”

177

Photo 8: Building a maloca. Resguardo indígena Tikuna-Uitoto,

Km. 6-11. 2005

193

Photo 9: A shaman, a ritual chanter, and a young woman of the Uitoto

ethnic group reflecting on the maps in the Kilómetro 11’s maloca. 1999

202

Photo 10: Jimoma dance ritual. Joko Ailloko Rïerue Nabïrï maloca, Resguardo indígena Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6-11. 2010.

208

Photo 11: Workshop of Social Photography, TAFOS. Indigenous

community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, 2000.

218

Figures Figure 1. The front page of the Development Plan presented to the Municipality of Leticia by the indigenous association of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11.

Tables Table 1. Clans and ethnic groups of the Kilómetro 11 Community, Comunidad Indígena Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Muirui.

Table 2. Malocas in the Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto Kilómetro 6-11

Table 3. Terms by which the Muina distinguish themselves from the Murui

(from Gasché, 1972, p. 209).

Notes on Transcription The following conventions have been adopted for transcribing oral texts. • • • •

•

Bold has been used to indicate an emphasis in the utterance. Three dots indicate a pause in an individual utterance. Three dots in square brackets indicate a cut in the transcription. Text included in square brackets is my reconstruction of implicit information. For example: “Then we passed it [the project], we pass it this way and it came out 30 [million pesos].” Text included in parenthesis indicates the interference of the transmitting voice in the transmitted voice.

For example: ‘[the official told us] “[…] you cannot have an engineer because you don’t have (I don’t know what) from the chamber of commerce”.’ Because of the specificity of the action of consuming mambe, which cannot be properly translated as “eating” or “chewing” coca, I follow Echeverri’s suggestion (Candre and Echeverri, 1996; Echeverri, 1997), and use “to mambe” as an English verb. To mambe indicates the action of putting coca inside the cheeks, and slowly absorbing it through the mouth. Foreign words commonly used in the text, such as maloca, resguardo, mambe, ambil, will not be in italicized after the first occurrence.

Pronunciation ï, i = high central vowel ll, y = voiced palatal fricative

Acknowledgements This work would have not been possible without the help of many people and institutions. I acknowledge the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Graduate College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Nelle M. Signor Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Illinois Program of Research in the Humanities (IPRH), which provided funds that allowed me to study at the University of Illinois, do research in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, and write my dissertation. Post-doctoral funding was provided by the Spencer Foundation for Research in Education. I thank my mentors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in particular Janet Keller, Kris Lehman, Bill Kelleher, and Norman Whitten, my thesis advisor, for guiding and nurturing my interests over the years. Neil L. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin-Madison) was an invaluable addition to my doctoral committee. His intellectual breadth and enthusiasm have inspired me tremendously and will never be forgotten. In Colombia my thanks go to Juan Álvaro Echeverri, Carlos Zárate and Germán Vallejo, and Hugo Camacho (ICBF), Fabiola Herrera, and Fernando Mosquera (Red de Solidaridad Social) who made me appreciate how individual actors who operate in the institutional arena can make a difference. I thank Nelson Ortiz for the hours spent discussing the working of development and indigenous alternatives in this region. I also thank the friends of the Reserva Cerca Viva for relieving the burden of ethnographic research and for their hospitality, and Marcela Lucía Rojas for allowing me to use some of the photographs she took in the Resguardo while visiting in 2010.

I feel privileged for having had the opportunity to know and work with Amazonian indigenous people. I thank the people from the Resguardo TikunaCocama-Yagua of Puerto Nariño, from the indigenous community San Martín de Amacayacu, and from the Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11, as well as the many indigenous individuals I met during the years who shared with me their wisdom, and trusted me enough to involve me in their struggles. I am particularly grateful to the people of the indigenous community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï Muina-Murui, the “place of the sweet science,” for their kindness, patience, and friendship. My respect and gratitude go to Juan Flórez Reátegui, Juan Flórez Valle, Alfonso García, Nicanor Morales, Walter Morales, Lucinda Vásquez, Jesús Vásquez, Cristóbal Gómez, Chirui, Panerito, Jhonny (sic), César, Aurelia and Rosalia, among others. My special thanks go to my friend Celimo Nejedeka Jifichíu for his patience and generosity. My dearest gratitude goes to my family, who has encouraged, inspired, and helped me through all these years in countless ways. My deepest thanks go to my parents, Nicoletta Badoni and Maurizio Micarelli, for encouraging me to find my way in the forest of knowledge as well as in real forests bestowing on me their unconditional love, trust, and support. My brother Vincenzo offered his skills as a photographer while visiting us in the Amazon. The Workshop of Social Photography we developed in the indigenous community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï Muina-Murui would have not been possible without his help and enthusiasm. Hernán Gómez —Chona— has been a tireless travel companion, and this work has been deeply enriched with his creativity, reflections, and fine understanding of the Amazonian world. He also created two maps included in this books. Dulcis in fundo, Aikuna and Nicoletta, our daughters, to whom I dedicate this book.

14 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Introduction Full of merit, yet poetically / Humans dwell on this earth (F. Hölderlin)

One evening, a few weeks before leaving the field, I was at home waiting for my friend and consultant Nemesio.1 We had planned to work hard to complete the project on Muinane health promotion and prevention that he wanted to submit to the Municipality’s Health Office for funding. I had just finished making cahuana, a manioc starch beverage mixed, in this particular case, with pineapple juice. Refreshing and sweet, cahuana is the woman’s counterpart to cool tobacco and sweet coca, and the beverage is considered to be the woman’s contribution to a successful coca and tobacco talk. Finally Nemesio arrived. He did not walk in freely as he always did, but stood at the door: “Hi, I’m going to a talk session with some doctors, lawyers from Bogotá. I need our notes. We’ll have to work another day.” I grudgingly handed him a bunch of hand-written papers containing the work of the last few months on indigenous notions of health. “I need all of them.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Your green booklets.” “You mean my field notes? What do you need them for?” “I cannot explain now. I’m in a hurry. Please, get a move on.” As most anthropologists, I tend to be quite protective with my notes, and I was especially unprepared to expose them to the perils of the tropical night and to the unheard commentary of the “doctors” from Bogotá. 1. Name has been changed.

The disappointment over a night of work gone to nothing, combined with Nemesio’s rush, superseded my usual trust in him. So, in spite of his insistence, I refused to give him my booklets. The day after, he showed up in his usual cheerful mood. He looked tired but radiant, like after winning a soccer match. He sat down in the hammock, and, without me asking, he started narrating the talk he had had the night before. “I really don't understand how white people can talk about one thing and the other. We talked about law, and the Maya Calendar, and ethnoeducation... The Speech flies around, it gets all tangled up. The Speech That Cures is the one you define out of the chispero.2 Can you imagine what it means to suck the energy of all those lawyers? What a job! I got dizzy. I almost fainted. I had to go and take a shower and wash out all that filth. They were talking about this and that and I was adjusting all what they were saying. Squeeze all the juice out of the talk and make it into a fruit. The heart is sweet and the peel is neither sweet nor bitter. It must be strong. This is a defense. This is why I asked you for the notes. It was because I was going to ask the Grandfather of Tobacco to bless them with the Speech of Life. He revealed to me all the corrections we have to make to the papers. But those you did not give to me have not received the influence of the Speech. So I’m sorry but they will stay with the errors!” And he smiled.

Living in the Kilómetros : Conceiving Theory as Praxis This book is based on research carried out in the Colombian Trapecio Amazónico during a two-year period, from 1998 to 2000. Several years have passed since then, and of course, many things have changed. I was back in “the field” from 2004 to 2007 and for the whole year 2009, and while living in Bogotá I was able to maintain close contact with many of the individuals who helped me gain some understanding of the issues discussed here. During these years, the map, social as well as physical, has been constantly changing: malocas have fallen, moved, and rebuilt, new leaders have emerged, 2. The noun chispa means ‘spark’ in Spanish, but in Colombian Spanish slang chispero indicates an animated argument in which contrasting opinions are expressed.

16 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

alliances have shifted, politics have been readjusted. Yet these movements keep revealing the particular disposition with which people deal with identity and change. Paraphrasing Clifford (1997, p. 3), roots do not necessarily “always precede routes”; rather, people’s routes seem to strengthen cultural meanings and senses of dwelling in this particular scenario. The point of departure of my research was how indigenous people who live in multiethnic communities at the periphery of an Amazonian town3 cope with development. While I looked at concrete interactions between indigenous people and development officials, a series of contradictions came into view. On one hand, indigenous people’s strong criticism of the development enterprise seemed to be at odds with their efforts to partake in development projects. On the other, people’s perception of abjection diverged from the stated development goal of improving people’s quality of life. As I tried to empirically unravel these issues, I realized that their complexity could not be accounted for through a dominance/resistance approach. Gradually, I also realized that development is envisioned as a pathogen, and therefore, that the possibility for indigenous people to participate in development is dependent on a process of “curing,” both in the sense of healing and of making suitable for human consumption (as in curing the meat of wild pray). This process is dependent on the rearticulation of interethnic values and identities. Accordingly, I followed Escobar’s (1995) suggestion and looked at development as both a regime of practices and representation, and “an arena of cultural contestation and identity construction” (p. 15). For the Gente de Centro4 —a linguistically diverse, but culturally relatively uniform ensemble of ethnic groups located in the North West Amazon5— this twofold process is articulated through a language philosophy centered on speech performances and the ritual consumption of coca and tobacco. The Speech of

3. The town of Leticia, in the Colombian Department of Amazonas. Los Kilómetros refers to multiethnic, predominantly indigenous communities located at the border of the indigenous Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6-11, named after the number of kilometers that separate them from the town of Leticia, on the Leticia-Tarapacá road. 4. Literally People of Center, for the time being I adopt here the translation People of the Center that has become common among scholars working in the region. 5. People of the Center includes approximately 7,500 individuals of Uitoto, Bora, Miraña, Muinane, Andoke, Nonuya and Ocaina patrilineal clans in the Caquetá, Putumayo and Amazonas regions of Colombia and in the northern Amazonas region of Peru (see Echeverri, 1997; Londoño, 2001)

Introduction • 17

Coca and Tobacco,6 also known as Speech of Life, is mobilized as a powerful symbol of both healing and dissent, of cultural continuity and interethnicity. This philosophical and ritual system translates a body of knowledge related to the management of life and defense against illness into concrete daily tasks. It is based on the idea that life depends on people’s personal responsibility to take care of life through processes that, at the same time, transform, organize, and reproduce diversity. According to Echeverri (1997), the body of knowledge expressed by the Speech of Coca and Tobacco’s language philosophy was instrumental in the creation of the Gente de Centro’s supra-ethnic “moral community,” after the genocide and diaspora that followed the rubber boom, at the beginning of last century. He also noticed [the] general tension between the desire to maintain a ‘closed’ system of cultural reproduction —one which is based on secret knowledge and ethnic difference— and an ‘open’ system which allows for the incorporation of new elements from other groups and the construction of a supraethnic discourse. Such a closed system is based on an endogamic ideal of maintenance of identity. An open system, on the other hand, is based on an exogamic ideal of exchange and reciprocity. (pp. 101-102)

Following this argument, my suggestion here is that the reconfiguration of the indigenous society as a moral community is always suspended on the edges of its own immorality, which implies a constant process of negation of cultural concepts and values to enable the creation of new concepts and values (Fabian, 2001). I take this tension, revealed in the dynamics of interethnic re-organization, as a central aspect of indigenous historicity. The concept of supra-ethnic “moral community” positively disengages the equation of culture, ethnicity, and language affiliation, but to avoid the reproduction of a much criticized view of culture that stresses integration and conformity, we must understand this concept as not defined once for all, but as fundamentally contingent and performative. This moral community is dependent on the continuing selection of existing structures and meanings, and their 6. In Spanish this would be “Palabra de coca y tabacco,” literally “Word of Coca and Tobacco.” However, to avoid the ambiguities that the literal translation could present in English, and to focus on its performative aspect, I decided to translate this concept as “Speech of Coca and Tobacco.” In some cases, though, I maintain the translation “Word,” when indigenous discourse stresses the sacred origin of the Speech of Coca and Tobacco.

18 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

strategic reconfiguration to respond to the situation at hand. I see this as the result of a process of articulation: “the construction of one set of relations out of another [which] often involves delinking or disarticulating connections in order to link or rearticulate others” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 54). My approach engages the recent discussion of Amazonian society as adhering to a “virtue-centered” moral system (Overing and Passes, 2000). Rather than concerned with conformity to rules and obligations, as in a “rights-centered” view of morality, this system is “primary centered upon the quality of ‘the good life’ which is engendered through the artful practices and skills of those who personally and intimately interact in everyday life” (Overing and Passes, 2000, p. 4). The relevance of this distinction for my approach is that it conjoins thinking and sensual life in the understanding of native Amazonians’ view of sociality. Moreover, the moral ideal of peaceful coexistence, which Santos-Granero (2002) calls “the struggle for conviviality,” can only be understood by going beyond locality and the domestic domain, and by adopting an interethnic perspective that highlight relations of exchange, alliance, affinity, predation, and transethnic changes (Santos-Granero 2000, 2002). In other words, we should look at social action in Amazonia as unraveling at the junctures between what Amazonian scholars have called “the political economy of control,” “the symbolic economy of alterity,” and “the moral economy of intimacy” (Overing-Kaplan 1981; Rivière, 1973; Turner, 1979; Viveiros de Castro, 1996; Santos-Granero, 1991, 2000). Said in other words, the construction of sociality is also dependent on the strategic appropriation of non-indigenous practices and discourses. So, the central question I address in this book is how social and cultural networks are interwoven in and through the dialectics between the ‘inside’ world of shared substances (lo de adentro) and the ‘outside’ world of radical alterity (lo de afuera), projecting the struggle for conviviality across the indigenous/non-indigenous divide. A central aspect of this process is the creation of historical schemes in memory. The re-membering of interethnic traditions, based on ideals of cooperation and alliance between groups, is paralleled by voluntary acts of forgetting of less peaceful practices, such as warfare, slavery, witchcraft, and cannibalism. Remembering and forgetting constitute two sides of the same process (Fabian, 2001) in which the implicit and seemingly forgotten coexist with what is brought to mind and publicly stated. This process is profoundly historical, in the sense that it engages indigenous visions of history and their

Introduction • 19

capacity to imagine alternative futures. I take indigenous historicity —the “cultural proclivities that lead to certain kind of historical consciousness within which [indigenous] histories are meaningful” (Whitehead, 2003a, p. xi)— as a central element of indigenous sociality, and look at culture as “an historical product so that even the denial of a given history results from cultural processes that are shaped through that denial” (Whitehead, 2003a, p. xii). In this regard, indigenous conceptions of development as a pathogen —that must be cured and controlled— should not be seen as a symptom of abjection, but rather a way in which indigenous people regain control over history and agency in a situation of crisis, which pervades, as a virus, the human, social, and cosmic bodies. My argument draws inspiration from Michael Taussig’s (1987) study of terror and healing, in which he shows how images of the wild Uitotos were colonially generated to authorize the Casa Arana’s regime of terror. The same terrifying images became magically empowering, as they were symbolically overturned in shamanic healing rituals. However, Taussig does not tell us how the ‘Wild Indians’ “mobilized terror in order to subvert it” (p. xiii) through the healing ritual of coca. This issue urges me to acknowledge healing as a key process in indigenous perspectives of culture, history, and identity, one that puts emphasis on embodiment and personal agency. I agree with White (2002, p. 1) that “identities come from turbulence”; they are “triggered by disjunctions in interactions, social and environmental. For example, awakening each morning is a disjunction from sleep which re-triggers an identity into action.” White (2002) also stresses that “beginning as it does from disjunctions, identity is the expression in social context of the same urge for secure footing that also leads to habits of posture in physical settings” (p. 3). This suggests that processes of identification can be seen as developing at the suture of individual bodies, and changing natural, social and political environments. In this regard, my view of the body coincides with that of critical medical anthropology, as “unquestioningly real and existentially given, even though its very giveness is always historically and culturally produced. Although bodies are, to a certain extent, ‘made up’, there are limits to their made-upness” (Scheper-Hughes, 1994, p. 230). Human bodies represent the intersection of the personal, social, and political bodies, and fissures in this intersection, such as the perception of impending illness, are what make the subversive body possible. Along this line, Hall (1996, p. 12) asks why “there is no theorized account of how or why bodies should not always-for-ever turn up, in

20 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

place, at the right time.” He also reminds us that this “is exactly the point from which the classical Marxist theory of ideology started to unravel.” Besides critical medical anthropology, this point was taken by Marxist cognitive anthropology, in particular by a brief but incisive article by Maurice Bloch (1985) on the relationship between ideology and cognition. In his article, Bloch maintains a difference between those knowledge processes that legitimize domination by creating an alternative view of the cosmos —which he calls “ideology”— and those that organize the experience constructed through day-to-day interactions, which he calls “cognition.” With this distinction he is suggesting that cognition is at least partly able to elude overarching ideological structures, and eventually subverting them. Following this suggestion, I try to locate the source of dissent in the contradictions that unravel between ideology and cognition. I adopt an unorthodox take of ‘dissent’ that is closer to its etymology: ‘dis-sensus’, that is, to feel or sense differently. So, dissent constitutes a political praxis that is rooted in the way in which people perceive and feel the world; it arises from sensual perception, from people’s experiences of themselves and of relations of contact and domination that refuse to conform to the images induced by disciplinary power. What’s more, dissensus is engendered from clashing conceptions of well-being and the ways by which well-being is pursued. By seeing the body not as the docile instrument of power, but as the site of resilience, I agree with the critique addressed to Michel Foucault’s idea of “docile body,” that stresses in particular how this concept “leads to an overestimation of the efficacy of disciplinary power and to an impoverished understanding of the individual which cannot account for experiences that fall outside the realm of the ‘docile body’” (Mc Nay, 1994, p. 104). In the final period of his writing, Foucault moved away from the power that is exercised on, and that forms subjects to the power through which individuals form themselves (Nehamas, 1998, p. 179). His idea of the “care of the self” is fundamental to my understanding of indigenous resilience as based upon embodied notions of well-being. Foucault also saw the techniques for the care of the self as instruments of morality, and connected them explicitly to medical thought and practice. According to Nehamas (1998, p. 178) the care of the self is “not a process of discovering who one truly is but of inventing and improvising who one can be.” This process —that for the People of the Center is articulated and pursued through the Speech of Coca and Tobacco— is historically situated, and it implies the ability to rearrange and manipulate the given. It is essentially a process by which one pursues the desired kind of health.

Introduction • 21

To counter a static view of culture I rely on the key concepts of praxis, performance, and poetics. These concepts provide a useful vantage point from which we can explore the art of living through which indigenous philosophers make the articulation of a mode of life the central theme of the daily care of the self. I see praxis as “action plus reflection” (Freire, 1970), and agree with Escobar (1992a, p. 30) that “reflection on daily life has to be located at the intersection of micro-processes of meaning production, on the one hand, and macro-processes of domination, on the other.” So, I understand praxis as a fundamentally dialectical process of construction and articulation of meanings that extends beyond locality, and that engages “a multitude of actors working together to give form to experiences, ideas, feelings, projects” (Fabian, 1990, p. 13). I see performances as more temporally and spatially bounded events aimed at accomplishing an effect, and shaped by the joint action of ethics and aesthetics. From an epistemological point of view, the focus on performance is relevant because it shuns the hierarchical distinction between the observer and the observed, contributing the construction of networks of knowledge and practice that are conducive to counter-hegemonic agency (Fabian, 1991). In this way, it is possible to conceive of theory as praxis, a “nomad science” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) committed to following the shifting itineraries of everyday life. Finally, the notion of poetics suggests seeing norms as immanent in the concrete process of creation: it is “a doing that while it does, invents the ways of doing” (Pareyson, 1954). Concretely engaged with materials and techniques, poetics aims at realization, but, at the same time, it is tentative and processual. This notion puts emphasis on creative agency that unravels in history, as it is concerned not “with the formal properties of signs, symbols, and rituals —semiotics— but how those signs are used performatively through time” (Whitehead, 2002, p. 2). Praxis, performance, and poetics engage not only what is present but also the traces of memory, feeling, imagination, and desire that are submerged in everyday life. The mobilization of implicit knowledge, meaning, and feeling involves an experimentation with, and direct practice of, alternative frameworks of sense, also engendering a reflection about the human condition, in so doing warding off abjection and the attribution of abjection made by the dominant culture.

22 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Out of the House: Anthropological Knowledge and the Ethics of Fieldwork [...] the extraordinarily tenacious vision of a world divided into the more and less ‘developed’ has been, and in many ways continues to be, constitutive of the anthropological domain of study. Critiques of development, however necessary they may be, and however effectively they may be articulated, will not be sufficient to solve the Jekyll-and-Hide-like conflict between development and anthropology [...] On the contrary, so intimately intertwined is the idea of development (and its lack) with the idea of anthropology itself, that to be critical of the concept of development requires, at the same time, a critical reevaluation of the constitution of the discipline of anthropology itself. Anthropology cannot throw the evil twin out of the house, because the twin remains a part of itself, if only in a repressed and ill-acknowledged way (J. Ferguson, The A nti-Politics M achine p. 170.)

At the onset of my fieldwork in Amazonia I was struck with the realization that anthropologists are seldom welcome in indigenous communities. The main accusation addressed to anthropologists, and to scientists in general, is that they steal knowledge. Even if anthropologists usually exchange knowledge for some kind of compensation, these exchanges are perceived as saqueo (a pillage), a comparison that evokes past structures of exploitation. The equation of domination and investigation conveys a sense of powerlessness, and a common feeling expressed by consultants is the anxiety about how knowledge —a person’s most intimate possession— will be used for. As a Uitoto-Murui consultant once explained, “a psychological trauma makes us jealous with our knowledge.” The growing criticism that indigenous people address to the whole anthropological enterprise and the emergence of indigenous ethnographers, urged me to rethink the practice of anthropology, starting from a radical transformation of the ways in which knowledge is seen to be constructed in “the field”. Insisting to locate theory in academia, too often anthropology self-critique ended up in self-contentment, finally endorsing power asymmetries over the recognition of the plural sources of anthropological knowledge, and falling short to reconsider the nature of our knowledge and the utility of our discipline to our ‘subjects’ and the public at large. To this must be

Introduction • 23

added the tendency of anthropological narrative to systematize —and hence obscure— the fluidity of social relations. I believe, with Taussig (1987), that a montage of multiple foci is more apt to render the entanglement of conflicting worlds of meaning and the sense of the creative disorder that characterize the peripheries of development. But in order to destabilize my focus and perspective, I realized I needed to escape the anthropologist pigeon-hole. Then, my approach combined apprenticeship and engagement in a broad range of processes shaped by the people with whom I worked, which in turn led my research project to unexpected paths. An effect of adjusting myself to different perspectives was to multiply both knowledge-exchange occasions, and their register, which also provided me with an ‘emergency exit’ when a relation became too overwhelming. Apprenticeship, for example, could become exceedingly demanding for both the apprentice and the teacher, for reasons I will describe in Chapter 4. The role of asesora (literally consultant, but more with a connotation of “allied educated person”) was also very thorny, as I had to be careful not to be caught in the power conflicts between malocas and their shaman masters. These relationships were luckily counterbalanced by a freer and more familiar one, that of vecinos, neighbors, even with the specific expectations attributed to it.

Collaborative Action-Research At the beginning of our research, my husband Hernán Gómez and I made our equipment available to the comuneros (scooter, camera, tape recorder, laptop, printer, books and tools), and we offered our time and skills for helping with different projects they had generated. These included: • A research project conducted by four Uitoto indigenous leaders about their community’s daily life with relation to interculturality (“Historias de la vida cotidiana en la comunidad indígena Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina Murui, Km. 11, con relación a la interculturalidad”), which eventually won a grant by the Ministry of Culture. • A research project by a Muinane health promoter. The project focused on the People of the Center’s conceptions of health promotion and prevention, and it was aimed at integrating institutional and indigenous programs in indigenous communities of the Amazonas Department. After I left, the project received financial support by the Municipality’s Health Office.

24 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

•

The Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6 y 11. Territorial planning is a requirement set by the Colombian law for all territorial entities, included indigenous resguardos. In their plans, indigenous peoples are trying to establish their view and forms of management of the territory to respond to the challenges of modern society. In the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11, this task is made more difficult by the multiethnic texture of its population. My task, as consultant of the reservation’s organization ACITU in the process of territorial planning, was to help coordinate the activities in five different communities, including the workshops of social cartography that took place with the support of NGOs Gaia and Fundaminga. Commercial relation with Fair Trade. An experimental buying order was carried out with three artisans’ organizations of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11, and the Resguardo Tikuna-Cocama-Yagua of Puerto Nariño.

In addition to these projects, other two activities responded to the need of imagining relations with indigenous communities conducive to collective praxis. They were aimed at creating a di-version from the heavy psychological load resulting from the development enterprise. In 1996, Hernán Gómez and I presented the theater piece “Los Mendigos” (written by Juan Monsalve from the Popol Vuh of the Maya Quiché) in the Tikuna community San Martín de Amacayacu. Following the presentation, people asked us to spend some time in the community to train them in theater techniques. The workshop was based on the study of body actions used in daily activities such as fishing, weaving or making pottery. These actions were then used in the montage of oral histories collected by Tikuna youngsters. The group of theater anthropology they created, named Me’tare, after a mythical warrior and shaman, has been involved since 1996 in the cultural scene of the Amazonas Department. One of its accomplishments has been to attract indigenous youngsters to the valorization of their language, body, narrative, and cultural tradition (see Micarelli and Gómez, 2002). In 2000, with the help of Italian photographer Vincenzo Micarelli and artist Hernán Gómez, a Workshop of Social Photography (TAFOS) was developed in the multiethnic community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Murui, Km. 11. We provided cameras and film together with a basic training in photography to community members of all

Introduction • 25

ages, who used these newly acquired skills for investigating and representing their community. The pictures circulated in the community and were eventually exposed in the Universidad Nacional. The knowledge produced by these activities came about in a collective dialogue which involved a process of co-theorization. One result of such collaborative endeavor is that it provoked more questions than those that it was trying to answer, requiring the rediscovery and orchestration of individual and collective knowledge and skills, which in turn, fostered processes of cultural reaffirmation and self-determination. Moreover, some of these collaborations were eventually funded by institutions,7 giving economic yield besides the added value of improved self-esteem for indigenous researchers.

Ethnography of Institutions In order to understand the politics of development at a regional level, I studied the files of governmental organizations and NGOs, and interviewed development officials and consultants working in projects targeted at indigenous communities. Institutions I contacted included the Government of Amazonas, Red de Solidaridad Social, ICBF (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar), Ministerio del Medio Ambiente, Parque Nacional Natural Amacayacu, Ministerio de Cultura, Asuntos Indígenas, INCORA (Instituto Colombiano de Reforma Agraria), Corpoamazonia, Artesanías de Colombia, Universidad Nacional, Banco de la República, Resguardo Tikuna Uitoto Km. 6 y 11, Resguardo Tikuna Cocama y Yagua de Puerto Nariño, Comunidad Yagua-Río Tucuchira, Fundación GAIA, Fundación Hylea, Fundaminga (COAMA), Fundación Yulukairu, Reserva Cerca Viva. Moreover, I participated in meetings held by governmental and/or non-governmental organizations, including Indigenous territorial planning (1998-1999), Ethnoeducation (1999), and the Closed meeting of traditional healers organized by the Secretaría de Salud Departamental (1999). To better 7. Three projects were financed thanks to these collaborations. The research project Historias de la vida cotidiana... (Investigators: Juan Florez Valle, Juan Florez Reátegui, Nicanor Morales Pérez, Walter Morales Vásquez) that I describe in chapter 4 got a grant by the Fondo Mixto para la Promoción de la Cultura y las Artes, Ministerio de Cultura. The Municipal Health Office funded the Muinane research project on Health Promotion mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The main researcher, a Muinane man, was able to send for his father from the Caquetá and to work thoroughly with him on Muinane health conceptions and the formation of traditional health promoters.. A project for the commercialization of crafts of three artisans’ associations of the region was funded by Botteghe della Solidarietá, an Italian Fair Trade shop.

26 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

understand the implementation of Development in indigenous communities I also participated as consultant in a project designed by the indigenous reservation council of Puerto Nariño.

Apprenticeship Apprenticeship in a wide range of crafts, both in indigenous and non-indigenous settings, with and without a primary instructor, helped me access the specificity of cultural and idiosyncratic ways of doing (for the use of apprenticeship in research setting see Coy, 1989; Hutchins, 1995; Keller and Keller, 1996; Singleton, 1998, among others). This also required me to participate in the mambeadero (the place were people ritually consume coca) sessions at night, often until dawn (see Chapter 4). Apprenticeship furthers the understanding of the place of the body in producing, storing, and retrieving knowledge. This process can employ speech, such as directions, proverbs, songs, working metaphors, and so forth, uttered in the context of practical activity, or it can employ bodily images, oriented movements, and kinesthetically represented ideas. The processes that this ethnographic choice implies bear analogies to a walkabout, a journey that results in a cognitive transformation, internalized “by the translation of the narrative into a sequence of kinesthetic experiences and performances” (Shore 1996: 315).

Weaving a Text Hay que tenderse al máximo, ser voyant como quería Rimbaud. El novelista hedónico no es más que un voyeur One must stretch to the maximum, and be voyant as Rimbaud wished. The hedonic narrator is nothing but a voyeur (Julio C ortázar)

The need to account for the emergent nature of performance and the plural interpretability of meaning challenges not only the research process but also the way in which research is presented. The indigenous model of knowledge as a basket (see Chapter 2) assisted me in working up the plan of the dissertation. In order to account for the intricacy of the issues I set out to examine, I chose not to organize each chapter around distinct themes, or ‘hard’ topics, but around relations. This attempt is based on the idea that context

Introduction • 27

and actors are not given, but are mutually constituted in interaction. For example, the interaction between a bureaucrat and an indigenous leader shifts according to its location —an air-conditioned governmental office, a bar, or the maloca— the time of the day, or the sharing of coca and tobacco. This may be quite a trivial point but, nonetheless, it is rarely taken into account by ethnographies of development. Accordingly, I identify several ‘threads’, follow them along the chapters, and show the ways in which they intertwine with each other to co-produce different sets of interaction. Among these themes are the interplay of politics and poetics in the fields of representation, location, and identification, meaning making, indigenous conceptions and cures of development, and the relation between knowledge and practice. These threads can also be seen as itineraries. They encompass vision, rhythm, acquired skills and improvisations. Chapter 1, “Entwined Territories: Sensory Itineraries and the Topography of Power”, focuses on the interconnection of local and global processes in the town and periphery of Leticia. I situate this set of connections in the regional, historical, and ethnohistorical context before describing the locality and the local organization of power. For example, I show how rituals create and connect alternative localities, and how these network often subvert the “spatial incarceration” provoked by colonial and neo-colonial processes (Whitehead, 1992b). Stressing movement as well as territory, I also examine the ways in which people in diaspora cultivate a sense of dwelling (Feld and Basso, 1996). I briefly discuss the history of multiculturalism in the Resguardo’s communities, I look at the maloca as a contested symbol of unity, and I address the notion of community as a development cliché that in many ways stands against attempts to reaffirm indigenous identity, also analyzing how the interplay of different forms of social aggregation is negotiated. In Chapter 2, “Situating Development”, I argue for the need to complicate the dichotomy between ‘developers’ and ‘those to be developed’ and look at individual strategies for dealing with development. I explore indigenous rationales for strengthening interethnic forms of organization in response to development, in particular the importance given to coca and tobacco as symbols of unity and resilience. Suggesting that ideologies of progress, such as the development ideology, disjoint memory from historical agency, I introduce indigenous perspectives on culture and history that put emphasis on intentionality, embodiment, and personal responsibility.

28 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

In the “Comparative Interstice”, I narrate an event that happened on the verge of development, in the Ucayali Region of Peru, where I conducted research before moving to Colombia. It tells how, at development interfaces, identity is caught in the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, which oftentimes deploy terror as well as imagery. Chapter 3, “Policies, Politics, and Orders of Worth”, takes as its point of departure the claim made by the People of Center that “Development makes us sick.” By adopting what Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg calls a conjectural or evidential paradigm (1980a), I work through a variety of small clues to tackle the causes, symptoms, and course of a pathology as the People of the Center experience and describe it. I look into the development’s ideological milieu through the analysis of specific context of plan design and implementation. I describe how mechanisms of development, such as bureaucracy, institutional rhetoric, and technical training create a cosmology which predetermines the needs of people and the ways to satisfy them by disseminating modes of thinking and doing that are naturalized and incorporated in everyday life. I examine how racialized notions of culture contribute to create a spatial-temporal framework that limits the possibility of acting. This framework explains, justifies, and eventually reproduces inequality by constructing the “underdeveloped subject” as lacking something: rationality, skill, or assets. I show the effects of this powerful apparatus on social relations, and contrast it to native conceptions about language and power. This discussion provides an entry to the notion of crisis, as it is articulated by indigenous leaders. Chapter 4, “Weaving the Basket of Knowledge: Poetic Performances”, concentrates on indigenous conceptions of health and illness, asking how they are linked to notions of knowledge, speech, and agency. This connection is made clear by the indigenous speech genre and philosophical-ritual system known as Speech of Coca and Tobacco, or Speech of Life, whose basic principle is “think well, speak well, work well; and turn this into abundance for all.” Inherent in the Speech of Coca and Tobacco is a notion of culture as daily practice aimed at maintaining and promoting a healthy life in the cosmos. Every night, indigenous leaders meet in the maloca, the big communal house, where they prepare and ritually consume mambe and ambil, powdered coca leaves and tobacco paste. After discussing and analyzing daily events, they heal the world with the Speech of Coca and Tobacco. Basing my discussion on my participation to these events and my collaboration with an indigenous health promoter, I adopt a performative approach to the

Introduction • 29

Speech of Coca and Tobacco. By engaging ideas of embodiment, this analysis seeks to illuminate the extent of indigenous critiques of development, the range of its effects on indigenous ways of life, and the reasons for its failure to improve the people’s quality of life. Chapter 5, “Organization: Histories and Territories”, is about two indigenous projects for which I worked. They constitute a critical response to development programs in indigenous territories, and show how a bureaucratic form —the project— is transformed and appropriated by indigenous leaders on the basis of cultural values. One is a research project designed and conducted by four Uitoto indigenous leaders. It was aimed at understanding the dynamics of interethnic relations within the history of territorial appropriation and cultural transformation that followed the rubber boom diaspora. The other project is the Resguardo’s Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial, a requisite of the Colombian law in the process of State decentralization. This project reveals how the political and cultural negotiations for the appropriation and definition of a multiethnic territory are managed on the basis of a pan-amazonian model of, and for, political action. This is called, alternatively, “law of origin,” “ancestral management,” or “ancestors’ footsteps.” In the Conclusions, I link the discussion of indigenous interethnic networks, embodied knowledge, and cultural praxis, to what Walden Bello (2001) calls the “globalization from below,” and Arturo Escobar (1995) describes as the capacity to “imagining a post-development era.” * For the People of the Center, knowledge must be paid back with knowledge or a powerful equivalent of it, such as coca and tobacco. For example, when a man wants to acquire knowledge from an elder, a song or a healing spell, he will prepare mambe and ambil and give them to the elder as an offering. Knowledge that is not acquired through a reciprocal exchange of power “no sirve”; it is not only useless but intrinsically dangerous. The giver may lose his/her power, the receiver his/her mental and physical health, and the parental groups of both individuals involved, as well as the society and the cosmos, are doomed to be affected by the negative consequences of an improper transference of knowledge. At the beginning of my fieldwork, my family and I went to live by the Kilómetro 11 indigenous community, at about 7 miles from the town of

30 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Leticia. Twice a day I took the colectivo, a battered Volkswagen bus that connects the rural communities to town, to do research in institutions in Leticia. My first acquaintance with the people of the Kilómetro 11 was on that bus, during the half an hour ride that took to get to town. Stories, gossip, and jokes animated the trips, stretching or shrinking geographic distance. People talked about a variety of things: all the turnaround to get to sell fariña8 at a decent price; the commentaries on the story of a leader who fled to Brazil with the money that the U.S. military base was paying to the community for renting a plot inside the Resguardo to install a radar; the on-going epic of a jaguar, a tigre mariposo, who appeared here and there on the road, ate dogs and chickens and terrified people, not a tigre común, but a brujo, a sorcerer seeking revenge. Hunting and fishing stories, cheating, magic, and condensed wisdom shaped the interaction on the bus. Sometimes everybody stayed quiet, the only sound being that of romantic ballads or Brazilian hiphop, and the hoarse roar of the engine. In that initial period I rarely went to the maloca. During weekdays I was doing research in the offices of Leticia, and I knew I was not allowed to participate, during the night, in the circle of men in the mambeadero. That space, as well as coca, are proscribed to women. My place had to be on the women’s side of the maloca. However, no women participated in the night meeting in the maloca. I thought that there was no point in sitting alone in the dark without being able to hear what was said on the opposite side. But after the news that new gringos had arrived spread in the neighborhood, we started receiving visits from men and women of the community, either at dawn or at night. Day by day, and night by night, we became woven into a net of mutual exchange and bonds of knowledge and everyday activities, and little by little we were drawn closer to the People of the Center’s world and their labored process for autonomy. One of the main concerns troubling the leaders was that they felt unprepared to cope with development. They were trying to devise solutions to this problem and were looking for possible allies. Our collaboration began by assisting them in writing letters to bureaucratic institutions in Leticia, and sometimes by delivering them. Initially, I had planned to do part of my fieldwork in Leticia and part in a “more traditional” Tikuna community located on a tributary of the Amazon river, 70 miles from the town. I had not considered doing research in 8. The coarse flour of manioc (Manihot esculenta).

Introduction • 31

the Kilómetro 11 community because it was multiethnic, it was too close to town, and it had a terrible reputation. Eventually, these same reasons made me change my mind. One night, bored for the painstaking work with bureaucratic institutions, I decided to pay a visit to the maloca with my partner Hernán Gómez, who was regularly attending the mambeadero sessions. Surprisingly enough, I was invited to sit in the mambeadero, and I was offered mambe, which I accepted. While trying not to choke, my mouth full of the fine powder of toasted coca leaves, I pondered the implications of that act. Perhaps they did not see me as a woman. Perhaps that was the strategy they used to involve ‘doctors’ in their struggle. Maybe they were asking me for something, developing bonds of knowledge that sooner or later I had to reciprocate.

32 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

COLOMBIA

Rio

ECUADOR

Caq ueta

Pu tu ma yo

Pto. Nariño RIO AMAZONAS

Leticia

Rio

Uc ay a

Rio Marañ on

BRAZIL

Pucallpa

PERU

Map 1: The Peruvian-Colombian-Brazilian border with main locations where research was conducted. Map by Hernán Gómez.

INTRODUcTION • 33

Este libro se termin贸 de imprimir Bogot谩 D.C. en el mes de noviembre del 2014. Fue compuesto con caracteres Berkeley Oldstyle Book y Futura.

en los talleres de Javegraf en

Feminización y pedagogías feministas. Museos interactivos, ferias de ciencia y comunidades de software libre en el sur global TANIA PÉREZ - BUSTOS

Perspectivas antropológicas sobre la Amazonia contemporánea

MARGARITA CHAVES Y CARLOS DEL CAIRO,

COMPILADORES

INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

OTHER TITLES

Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development GIOVANNA MICARELLI